The 3D Axis -- Yep, 'Y' is up.

In the past few blogs, I’ve focused on the state of panoramas as visual medium.  There’s still quite a bit to talk about there, but I’d like to shift gears to discussing 3D.  3D is a big topic and there are lots to discuss, so I will break down this blog series into specific topics within 3D — hence the “part 1.”

Let’s first discuss a framework from which we can breakdown 3D into various sub components:

• 3D content authoring – This refers to the content authoring; how they are made (e.g. tools to automation), file formats
• 3D distribution – Here, we’ll talk about how the content gets to the users, file formats, algorithms, etc.
• 3D viewer/player – Once the data reaches the user, a viewer or a player is necessary to see and interact with the content
• 3D application – Finally, there should be a reason for creation of the 3D content; we discuss UI, UX

So, moving forward, we can categorize our discussions into one (or more) of these buckets to give us a good basis for a decent framework.  There may will be more, and this is not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good start (and I ain’t waiting for this to be right to blog).